Tired of the same holiday spread, year after year, but also afraid of changing things too much-- so much that it won't feel like a holiday at all? If you live in the 1960s (or at least appreciate the casserole-and-gelatin aesthetic of the time period), Modern Approach to Everyday Cooking (American Dairy Association, 1966) has some small twists on some holiday classics just for you.
If it's too much work to make both poultry and a green bean casserole (or if you've got leftover cooked chicken or can easily procure a precooked one from the grocery), Chicken Green Bean Casserole handily combines them into one main dish.
If you miss the tang of cranberries from Thanksgiving, add a festive Layered Cranberry Salad.
It's packed with cranberry and orange flavor-- very festive-- but your tolerance for it may depend on how you feel about lumpy cottage cheese as part of a Jell-O salad, stringy and vegetal wads of celery hiding out in a mostly-sweet salad, and/or soggy (and often rancid-tasting) walnuts soaking away in those jellied depths.
If you're an eggnog fan, the Eggnog Christmas Salad may be more your style.
It still has festive cranberry and orange-- along with some eggnog diluted with more than a pound of crushed pineapple. So... maybe it's better if you only kind of feel like eggnog occasionally, rather than being a true eggnog lover.
I'm not sure these recipes would pass for "modern" in 2025. (Okay, I'm positive they would not!) But this stuff was cutting-edge if you asked the American Dairy Association in the 1960s. (And I imagine that the only ones who asked for this were the members of the American Dairy Association.)
Mmm, celery and eggnog. I wonder if anyone ever recommended service eggnog with a celery stirring stick.
ReplyDeleteAlso, why would you use the curdled looking cottage cheese layer as the top layer of the "salad"? I guess it was a way to signal people to skip putting it on their plate so the hostess doesn't spend the next week fretting over bad smells in the house while she searches for all the places where people hid it after trying a bite.
I understand the weird combinations of flavors with a lot of old recipes as "we need to use up the leftovers before they go bad," but it's harder to understand when we get into holiday fare that is supposed to be the good stuff.
DeleteThe last time I put crushed pineapple into gelatin, it turned the whole thing fibrous. It was almost like cutting into a steak. No one liked it.
ReplyDeleteI do like celery in cranberry sauce though. But you do have to finely chop it.
Yeah-- I really don't get the whole fascination with crushed pineapple. It usually throws the texture off. I'd usually just rather use the tidbits if I want pineapple. (That said, my grandma's excellent cranberry salad used crushed pineapple in with the gelatin, but there were so many other types of fruit-- ground apple and cranberries, supremed orange bits-- that it broke up the pineapple and you really didn't notice the texture.)
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